Abstract: It is natural to make generalizations about what we see and hear, even if it is merely a snapshot. Without any historical context, the news we see today can be very plausible. For example, this week special prosecutor Mueller made heavily redacted court filings and the national press inferred, despite not knowing what was redacted, criminal behavior on the part of President Trump. Unless there is some doubt, the Mueller affair is purely political in its exploitation of prosecutorial tools. Whether there is any evidence of criminal activity is yet to be determined. However, in the light of historical context, there seems to be a pattern of tactics that are useful and effective in convicting political opponents in the court of public opinion. More disturbing is that the organizing principle for such a concerted effort seems to have remained constant over the past several decades.
IM:
Gentlemen, this was not a good week for President Trump.
Old Gadfly: Why do you say that?
IM:
The press is saying special prosecutor Mueller’s court filings indicate
criminal behavior by the President.
Old Gadfly: How do they know? They are inferring criminal behavior from redacted
material.
AM:
Amazingly, what we see playing out in the court of public opinion is not
the left’s first rodeo.
Old Gadfly: You are suggesting a pattern in terms of
convicting a political opponent. What
was the first rodeo?
AM:
The Watergate scandal. Just
today, Chuck Todd of Meet the Press used the expression “unindicted coconspirator”
in association with President Trump, first familiarized with President Richard
Nixon in 1974. Geoff Shepard, who was a
member of Nixon’s inner circle, recently published a book that more accurately
portrays what happened during this “scandal.”
In his book,
The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot that
Brought Nixon Down, Shepard pieces together previously unavailable
documents (memoranda, affidavits, etc.) previously unavailable through the Freedom
of Information Act and other avenues. What
he proves is that prosecutors conspired with judges, as documented via ex parte meetings (which are illegal),
coordinated leaks to the press to prep the public narrative, and illegally
collaborated with a Democrat-controlled Congress. Shepard provides a synopsis of his book in
this C-Span video.
IM: Prior to Watergate, the left
was victorious in mischaracterizing an effort to mitigate Soviet communist
infiltration of America’s institutions. Investigative
journalist M. Stanton Evans authoritatively explains how the left thwarted
Joseph McCarthy’s efforts in his book,
Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and
His Fight Against America’s Enemies.
Curious about what else might be available to shed light on Soviet
communist infiltration of our institutions, I discovered and read potent
first-person testimonials by former communists:
·
Whittaker
Chambers in his book,
Witness;
·
Bella Dodd in
her book,
School of Darkness;
·
Manning
Johnson in his book,
Color, Communism, and Common Sense (a copy of the book, along with his “farewell
speech about the NAACP,” is available here);
·
Englishman Douglas
Hyde in his book,
I Believed (available through
third-party sources outside of the United States);
·
William Z.
Foster in his book,
Toward Soviet America;
Bella Dodd, who rose to membership of the
National Committee of America’s Communist Party (which is alive and well--see here--in close alliance with one of America's major political parties), reflects that she was seduced
by Communism’s appeal to the love of humanity, a better society, and social
justice. Early in her indoctrination,
she explained her role of intellectually seducing others as a teacher at Hunter
College, in this excerpt:
There were other refreshingly new courses that year
and new professors, among them Raymond Moley, not yet a Roosevelt brain
truster. There were courses on the press and on public opinion. We young
people were intrigued by the possibilities of participation in government
control and the various means of achieving this.
In our enthusiasm we passed on to our students at
Hunter what we had learned. We challenged the traditional thinking they
had brought to college with them. We sent out girls to political clubs,
too. Soon political leaders began to find out what the idea was of
sending the "kids" to their clubs.
... Before long we were saying -- and not yet
realizing it was merely a rather meaningless cliche -- that the radicals of
today are the conservatives of tomorrow, that there could be no progress if
there were no radicals.
... By using this schematic device [categorizing
people as left or right] one puts the communists on the left and then regards
them as advanced liberals -- after which it is easy to regard them as the
enzyme necessary for progress.
Communists usurp the position of the left, but when
one examines them in light of what they really stand for, one sees them as the
rankest kind of reactionaries and communism as the most reactionary backward
leap in the long history of social movements. It is one which seeks to
obliterate in one revolutionary wave two thousand years of man's progress.
During my thirteen years of teaching at Hunter I was
to repeat this semantic falsehood many times. I did not see the truth
that people are not born "right" or "left" nor can they
become "right" or "left" unless educated on the basis of a
philosophy which is as carefully organized and as all-inclusive as communism.
I was among the first of a new kind of teacher who
was to come in great numbers to the city colleges. . . . (pp. 39-40)
Dodd
unsuccessfully tried to leave the Communist Party until she was expelled in
this manner:
On June 17,
1949, my telephone rang. "This is the Associated Press," said a
voice. "We have received a statement from the Communist Party
announcing your expulsion from membership. It says here that you are
anti-Negro, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, and defender of a
landlord. Have you any statement to make?"
The New York
papers carried the story the following day. . . . (p. 220).
Sound familiar? The
educational techniques and public court of opinion smear tactics Dodd describes
are as present today as they were in her day.
Consider for example, books in publication today:
·
Bini Adamczak’s book,
Communism for Kids, published by MIT
Press;
·
Rob Sander’s book,
Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights; and
·
Martha Freeman’s book,
If You’re Going to March
The last two books listed target children aged 4 to 8 and are
just a sampling of “social awareness” books being published on behalf of
progressive (socialist) thinking. See
for example the following photograph taken at a local bookstore.
AM: The cultural Marxism (this expression has been adeptly diminished through demagoguery by members of the left as in this presentation) that has
infected the left is succeeding because our younger generations have been
deprived of a proper “liberal education” that includes an accurate portrayal of
history and the real meaning of the “liberal democracy” that defeated 20th
Century totalitarianism in the form of its socialist siblings: communism and fascism.
Old Gadfly: Let’s unpack what you just
said.
AM: Marxism is essentially about
liberating the oppressed. Thus, there
must be evidence of oppression, even if it is imagined or manufactured, to
justify liberating, via social justice, those classified as oppressed. Perhaps the most blatant examples of the
oppressed are women afflicted with unwanted pregnancies (and who want the
freedom to kill the life in their womb) and nontraditional sexual
orientations. Both are contrary to
Judeo-Christian traditions. To take on
the mantle of a liberating force, members of the left must consider those who
subscribe to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the oppressors in order to take
on the moral superiority of atheistic secular humanism, where man, represented
by political elite, is supreme. Hayek saw
this development in the 1940s in his book,
The Road to Serfdom. He astutely observed:
The most effective way of making
everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is
directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function
efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the
same ends. It is essential that the
people should come to regard them as their own ends. Although the beliefs must be chosen for the
people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally
accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously
in the way the planner wants” (Chapter on “The End of Truth,” p. 171).
It was just this week that
Kevin
Hart experienced what Hayek wrote about when he was forced to step down as
the Oscar’s host. We have an entire
community of sexual orientations, contrary to the Judeo-Christian tradition,
that have been elevated to sacred status.
Voices to the contrary are being censored and even punished (like Hart),
such as the explosive investigative treatise by Enrique Rueda published in 1986
as The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy. His conclusion was that homosexuality was a
concerted political movement (to include pedophilia advocates such as the Howard Nichols Society in Austin, Tex., the North
American Man Boy Love Association in New York and Boston, and the Rene Guyon
Society in Los Angeles [see also this article
published during the same period]), and even
documented to what extent homosexuality had infiltrated the Catholic Church. Father Robert Altier, of the Church of St.
Raphael in Minnesota, attended seminary studies during this time and has a personal
accounting (presented in a homily on August 19, 2018) of what Rueda
documented. Try finding a copy of Rueda’s
book. Amazon
indicates used copies can be purchased through third-party sellers starting at
$700 per copy. Rueda assures the reader that the intent of his research was not to denigrate individuals (entitled to privacy), but to understand the nature of what he considered to be a "political movement" to impose through public policy certain beliefs (and behaviors) on others.
Old Gadfly: How about “liberal education” and “liberal
democracy”?
AM: The word “liberal” is key to properly
understanding these concepts. The
original meaning relates to classical liberalism, stemming from the
Enlightenment era, which emphasized individual liberty, property rights, limited
government, and a free market, yet still being grounded in the Judeo-Christian
tradition as the basis for moral reasoning.
Correspondingly, a liberal education included an appreciation for truth
and justice within this framework. Modern
liberalism coopted the term liberalism and emphasized the social dimension,
which is totally congruent with cultural Marxism and its social justice
tactics. Correspondingly, a modern
liberal education is oriented toward a Utopian future that can only be
manufactured and achieved by political elite (social planners). Therefore, the Judeo-Christian tradition must
be diminished for atheistic secular humanism to become the basis for moral
reasoning.
This distinction between
classical and modern liberalism is critical to understanding liberal democracy
and the left’s passion and commitment to destroying President Trump. The liberal democracy that was instrumental
in destroying (at least temporarily as America’s left is actively pursuing the
ideology that we fought against) socialist totalitarianism. Our Founders/Framers knew the dangers of
democracy and even wrote about it in The
Federalist Papers (see numbers 10, 14, and 26). Based on the principles of classical
liberalism, our Framers, established a Constitutional Republic (the only one
among the hundreds of nations), where the Constitution balanced classical
liberal principles with the natural tendency toward democracy. This balance becomes tenuous without a
disciplined adherence to the Constitution, where updates in its meaning are
through Article V amendments. The left
wants a living Constitution, where it is far more expedient for men and women
in black robes to update the meaning of the Constitution through court
rulings. This approach is consistent
with political elite behavior as described by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.
Old Gadfly: Political scientist George Friedman argues
that nationalism is an essential condition for liberal democracy. It reflects a common culture, language, and
set of values that unite society.
Contrary to this, the left pushes multiculturalism that destroys
nationalism and tragically divides society.
Even The New York Times’ Thomas
Edsall has realized to what extent America’s left has further shifted to
the left. Ironically, they tend to be “better
educated” (which means they have graduated from universities that are
predominately leftist among faculty and administrations) and far less
religious.
AM: This folly by Macron patently demonstrates
the dangers of progressivism, because its patriotism is to an imagined Utopian
future and thus would be opposite to the inherent patriotism of nationalism,
which is focused on the inherited wisdom of tradition. Therefore, progressives cannot teach younger
generations the truth about socialism and the millions of casualties in its
wake. Yet, America’s nationalism is what
inspired thousands of Americans to liberate others oppressed by the tyranny of
totalitarianism.
Old Gadfly: Obscured by the left’s concerted effort to
destroy President Trump is the contest between socialism (mollified by using
the term progressivism, unless you are Bernie Sanders or newly elected “socialists”)
and liberal democracy. Trump represents
the original meaning of liberal democracy.
Unfortunately, many Americans (too many) cannot penetrate the political
noise to recognize that the fundamental essence of what made America the beacon
of liberty, peace, and prosperity throughout the world is vulnerable to the
power-seekers of the left. You, are
correct AM. The Mueller affair is not
the left’s first rodeo.
